Morwenstow vicarage

The Revd Robert Stephen Hawker built this vicarage as he was the first resident vicar the parish had had for a long time. When he took the living in 1834 he and Charlotte had to lodge in a cottage far from the church.

The chimneys represent the towers of churches with which he and his father had been connected including Stratton, where his father was incumbent, and Whitstone, Charlotte's parish, and the kitchen chimney was based on his mother's monument!

Over the door he inscribed his own lines, reflecting the £365 value of the living:

A house, a glebe, a pound a day,

A pleasant place to watch and pray,

Be true to church, be kind to poor,

O minister, for evermore.

He and his wife Charlotte spent many happy years in the house with their three servants and many cats. They received distinguished visitors like the poet Tennyson in 1848. Hawker attempted his own Arthurian epic 'Quest of the Sangraal'.